8 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW
because the Phoenicians were correctly perceived to have been culturally very close to the Jews."7
I have quoted at perhaps too great a length from Bernal's text
because motive, so seldom an element brought to bear on the history
of history, is located, delineated and confronted in Bernal's research,
and has helped my own thinking about the process and motives of
scholarly attention to and an appraisal of Afro-American presence in
the literature of the United States.
Canon building is Empire building. Canon defense is national
defense. Canon debate, whatever the terrain, nature and range (of
criticism, of history, of the history of knowledge, of the definition of
language, the universality of aesthetic principles, the sociology of
art, the humanistic imagination), is the clash of cultures. And all of
the interests are vested.
In such a melee as this one-a provocative, healthy, explosive
melee- extraordinarily profound work is being done. Some of the
controversy, however, has degenerated into ad hominem and
unwarranted speculation on the personal habits of artists, specious
and silly arguments about politics (the destabilizing forces are dismissed as merely political; the status quo sees itself as not-as
though the term "apolitical" were only its prefix and not the most
obviously political stance imaginable since one of the functions of
political ideology is to pass itself off as immutable, natural and
"innocent"), and covert expressions of critical inquiry designed to
neutralize and disguise the political interests of the discourse. Yet
much of the research and analysis has rendered speakable what was
formerly unspoken and has made humanistic studies, once again,
the place where one has to go to find out what's going on. Cultures,
whether silenced or monologistic, whether repressed or repressing,
seek meaning in the language and images available to them.
Silences are being broken, lost things have been found and at least
two generations of scholars are disentangling received knowledge
from the apparatus of control, most notably those who are engaged
in investigations of French and British Colonialist Literature, American slave narratives, and the delineation of the Afro-American literary tradition.
Now that Afro-American artistic presence has been "discovered"
actually to exist, now that serious scholarship has moved from
silencing the witnesses and erasing their meaningful place in and
contribution to American culture, it is no longer acceptable merely
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